Recent hacker attacks on Betfair, Unibet and the New Jersey online gambling sites have pushed security up the agenda. What should be done?

Businesses do not like admitting to being the victims of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks but it is getting increasingly difficult to ignore them.

In December last year, Unibet was attacked. The operator’s head of poker Andrew West told players on the 2plus2 forum: “From around 15:00 to 23:30 GMT yesterday the Unibet poker site was DDOS'd. Our ISP had measures in place to prevent it but there were delays in them taking effect correctly. We're looking into ways to improve our protection to DDOS attacks, but it's hard to prevent them 100 per cent so we can't guarantee we'll be immune to them in the future.”

Indeed. In April, Betfair admitted an attack. It assured punters that their finds were safe but also admitted: “It would be irresponsible for Betfair to claim that we won’t ever be attacked again, however rest-assured that site uptime and stability continues to be our top priority and we’ll continue to invest in systems that protect us from criminal activity.”